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The present study examines head of state gender and national collectivism to explain how some leaders have been able to manage a pandemic better than others.

We measure pandemic deaths per million using objective numbers for each country. Country collectivism is measured using the GLOBE study. Qualitative analyses of world leader speeches are used to examine how health-focused leaders’ language is. Media attention with sentiment analysis about each leader’s handling of the pandemic is also used to show how others reacted to leaders.

Countries with female leaders showed fewer pandemic deaths than those led by male leaders. The interaction between leader gender and country collectivism predicted death. Media sentiment was more favorable for women leaders than men leaders.

During times of crises, women’s more careful tendencies keep their constituents safer than their male counterparts. Country collectivism also aids male leaders in keeping constituents safe.

The present study helps unpack when women leaders thrive and outperform their male counterparts. This furthers United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5: gender equality.

The study examines leader gender and national collectivism to predict pandemic deaths.

“Dora! Dora!” squealed my 18-month-old son from his stroller on the crowded subway platform. I scanned the crowd but could not locate the source of his excitement. Then a young girl turned her back to us and I saw on her purple backpack the face of “Dora the Explorer,” whose name had made its way into my son's small vocabulary. This scene could have easily taken place in any city or town in the US; young children of all ethnicities are familiar with Dora's animated television program. Worldwide, parents have spent over $3 billion on Dora the Explorer merchandise since 2001, and most products feature English and Spanish phrases (Jiménez, 2005). And Dora is not alone: her show was just the first in a recent wave of animated educational children's programs featuring Latino main characters and dialogue in Spanish.

Peer-reviewed indexable journals have expanded in recent decades as a result, in part, of the value given to research productivity (measured through citations). Latin American journals have grown prompted by the open access (OA) movement, the emergence of regional repositories/indexes, and policies linking institutional rankings and faculty salaries/promotions to indexed publications. This study’s aim was to map the ways Chilean, Colombian, and Venezuelan universities support journal publication. This qualitative study uses Margison and Rhoades’ (2002) Glonacal Agency Heuristic to describe factors that shape higher education (i.e., global, national, and local dimensions), adding university as unit of analysis. Semi-structured in-depth interviews from a previous study, current institutional documents, and websites of 12 major universities from Chile, Venezuela, and Colombia conformed the data of the study. Besides the most prestigious global indexes (Web of Science and Scopus) three regional repositories/indexes, Latindex, SciELO, and RedALyC, have played an important role as countries link faculty salaries/promotions and university ranking systems to publications included in one or more of these services. Latindex collaborates with national science and technology agencies, SciELO has country chapters based at universities (Colombia and Venezuela), and RedALyC works with individual institutions and journals. At the national level, Chile has mechanisms to provide funding for the publication and/or upgrade of journals and incentives to institutions for publications in indexed journals. Colombia’s journal evaluation system Publindex links articles in indexed journals to salary increases in public universities, standard that is also used by private institutions to grant monetary incentives to faculty for publications. Venezuela used to have a funding and publication incentive system that was discontinued in the last decade. Latin American journals are mainly published by universities. Institutions in this study have implemented strategies to support journals such as institutional repositories, discontinuation of print journals, technology support for OA publication, and funding mechanisms.

This study examines the factors that influence the ecotourist behavior of university students. The understanding of what motivates these students can inform future suggestions for strategies and actions in ecotourism.

The study was applied to university students of the University of Medellín, Colombia. It was an exploratory empirical study that surveyed a total of 696 students.

The results show that students with a positive attitude toward ecology tend to be interested in nature-related activities, therefore generating an intention to engage in ecotourism. The authors found that those who view ecotourism as an activity that promotes fun and happiness tend to engage more frequently in these activities.

This study is of great interest for research in motivational theory, specifically the analysis of personality profiles and how these relate to specific tourism behaviors. The findings of this study strongly suggest that those interested in the management and development of ecotourism should establish practices and programs that consider factors such as tourist segmentation, effective communication of the positive qualities of ecotourism and environmental stewardship involved in these activities.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on three fundamental human-related behaviour factors associated with Lean Six Sigma (LSS) projects in German manufacturing small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on the readiness of people (managers and their staff) to commence LSS projects. These are core personal competence, strategic vision of the people and the organisational culture of the specific organisation.

Based on a thorough review of the academic literature a set of hypotheses were constructed to examine the level of association between people’s competence, vision and culture with LSS readiness within SMEs. This was done using correlation and regression analysis. Data collection were carried out in seven different German manufacturing SMEs involved in aerospace supply and agro-food manufacturing using a survey instrument.

It was found that there is a strong positive association between the core competence of people and organisational culture with readiness for commencing LSS in the manufacturing SMEs studied. The core values of people, education level and the vision of making continuous quality improvement were identified as key variables in promoting LSS readiness in these manufacturing SMEs. This study indicates that these “softer” variables can be essential to successful LSS implementation and need to be explored further before undertaking the process.

From the perspective of the implementers of LSS the results of this research could be of interest to different manufacturing SMEs intending to embark upon an LSS journey as it highlights the significance of human-related behavioural factors in the process. SME organisations may consider carrying out development or training with their managers and employees around personal and organisational values, addressing core competence and strengthening organisational culture in order to facilitate LSS readiness and enhance the prospect of its success.

It would appear that this LSS research has not been carried out within the German manufacturing SME context before and although discrete in nature has surfaced the “softer” variables of core competence of staff and organisational culture as important readiness issues to address when undertaking LSS. This integrated approach of human behavioural factors, organisational culture, LSS and manufacturing SMEs demonstrates the originality of the research.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based human capital management (HCM) software solutions represent a potentially effective way to leverage and streamline a bank’s human resources. However, despite the attractiveness of AI-based HCM solutions to improve banks’ effectiveness, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no current studies that identify critical success factors (CSFs) for adopting AI-based HCM in the banking sector. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating CSFs for adopting AI-based HCM software solutions in the banking sector.

Full consistency method methodology and technology–organization–environment, economic and human framework are used for categorizing and ranking CSFs.

The study identifies the technological and environmental dimensions as the most and least important dimensions for AI-based HCM adoption in banks. Among specific CSFs, compatible technology facilities, sufficient privacy and security and relative advantages of technology over competing technologies were identified as the most important. Implementation of AI-based HCM solutions requires significant outlays of resources, both human and financial, for banks.

The study provides bank administrators a set of objective parameters and criterion to evaluate the feasibility of adopting a particular AI-based HCM solution in banks.

Despite the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to increase revenue, reduce costs and enhance performance, their adoption by organisations has fallen short of expectations, leading to unsuccessful implementations. This paper aims to identify and elucidate the factors influencing AI adoption at both the organisational and individual levels. Developing a conceptual model, it contributes to understanding the underlying individual, social, technological, organisational and environmental factors and guides future research in this area.

The authors have conducted a systematic literature review to synthesise the literature on the determinants of AI adoption. In total, 90 papers published in the field of AI adoption in the organisational context were reviewed to identify a set of factors influencing AI adoption.

This study categorised the factors influencing AI system adoption into individual, social, organisational, environmental and technological factors. Firm-level factors were found to impact employee behaviour towards AI systems. Further research is needed to understand the effects of these factors on employee perceptions, emotions and behaviours towards new AI systems. These findings led to the proposal of a theory-based model illustrating the relationships between these factors, challenging the assumption of independence between adoption influencers at both the firm and employee levels.

This study is one of the first to synthesise current knowledge on determinants of AI adoption, serving as a theoretical foundation for further research in this emerging field. The adoption model developed integrates key factors from both the firm and individual levels, offering a holistic view of the interconnectedness of various AI adoption factors. This approach challenges the assumption that factors at the firm and individual levels operate independently. Through this study, information systems researchers and practitioners gain a deeper understanding of AI adoption, enhancing their insight into its potential impacts.

In this study, the authors draw upon 10 years of collaborative teaching and research as two, White, women literacy teacher educators to theorize the role of humanizing pedagogies within literacy teacher education and share explicit examples of how these pedagogies might be operationalized in actual classroom settings.

This study is based on 10 years of qualitative, teacher inquiry research on authors’ shared practice as literacy teacher educators and has included focus groups with students, the collection of student work and extensive field notes on class sessions.

Contextualized within decades-old calls for humanizing teacher education practices, this study puts forward a framework for teaching literacy methods that centers critical, locally contextualized, content-rich approaches and provides detailed examples of how this study implemented this framework in two contrastive teacher education settings comprising different institutional barriers, regional student populations and program mandates.

The proposed framework of critical, locally contextualized and content-rich literacy methods offers one possibility for reconciling the divergent debates that perpetually shape literacy teaching and learning. As teachers are prepared to enter classrooms, the authors model concrete approaches and strategies for teaching reading within and against a sociopolitical landscape imbued with White supremacist ideals and racial bias.

This study aims at investigating the impact of the perceived importance of critical cultural readiness factors (CRFs) is on perceived importance of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) technical critical success factors (CSFs) in UK manufacturing sector.

A survey questionnaire through a multiple embedded case study was conducted. The study involves surveying people in the manufacturing firms followed by non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis test to study the relationships.

It was found that the people's perception towards impact of CRFs on technical CSFs of LSS projects is different depending upon each CRF, demographic factors and technical CSFs. This means that particular CRFs need to be prioritised to address LSS technical CSFs.

The study fills the research gap in investigating the perception of people towards inter-relationship of cultural or soft CSFs of LSS and technical or hard CSFs of LSS in manufacturing firms. Nevertheless, the authors suggest further multi-case study analysis covering different manufacturing fields as future studies.

The study is crucial for managers financially to be ready to invest on a successful LSS project and it helps them to diagnose the cultural causes of failure in a more timely way and effectively.

This is a preliminary study focussing on analysing inter-relationship between perceived importance of soft readiness factors and perceived importance of implementing success factors as a missing jigsaw in the current literature.